Interview of Sir Christopher Lee Remembering the Day He Met J.R.R. Tolkien in an Oxford Pub
Fans of The Lord of the Rings love the huge, epic moments, but sometimes the smaller real world encounters are the ones that feel the most magical.
During a 2006 appearance on Wogan, Now and Then, Sir Christopher Lee shared a charming story about the day he unexpectedly met J. R. R. Tolkien in the mid to late 1950s, long before he would become the cinematic face of Saruman.
It is one of those anecdotes that instantly lights up any Tolkien fan’s imagination and reminds you how close these legends once orbited each other.
Lee explained that he was sitting with some friends at The Eagle and Child in Oxford, the pub famously connected to Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the Inklings. It was the kind of setting where you might joke about Tolkien suddenly walking in, but Lee wasn’t joking when he noticed someone who looked unmistakably familiar.
“Pipe in hand, cheerful expression, looking exactly like every photo you’ve ever seen of him,” he recalled before repeating his stunned reaction. “My God, there’s the Professor,” Lee said.
One of his friends happened to have worked for Tolkien and casually offered to introduce them. A moment later, Tolkien approached their table with the same polite warmth that fans still imagine when reading his letters.
Tolkien greeted them with a simple, “How do you do?”
Lee shook his hand and tried to keep his cool even though meeting the creator of Middle-earth felt, as he said, like the kind of moment that could drop him straight to his knees.
It is such a small exchange, yet it carries enormous weight when you think about what these two men would later mean to generations of moviegoers and fantasy readers.
Long before Peter Jackson’s trilogy and long before Lee became etched in pop culture as the corrupted White Wizard, the two shared a quiet moment in a pub where so many literary ideas had been born.
It is a wonderful piece of Tolkien lore and a great reminder of Lee’s lifelong connection to the world he would one day help bring to life on screen. If you have never heard him tell the story himself, it is absolutely worth watching the clip.